As he introduced Heaven’s Heart, producer Jonas Fredriksen commented it depicted, “The most brutal war that has ever taken place.” … “The merciless battlefield called marriage.” That might be about right. Or perhaps it is just about our fears of mediocricy and loneliness. The panic of wasting our lives, of being useless, that overwhelms the best of us at the worst of times.
Heaven's Heart
The film, written and directed by a Dane, Simon Staho, is populated two married couples. All the spouses are close friends and the action is set mainly in their respective apartments. “She’s content,” one of the husbands bitterly comments on his wife’s lack of interest in sex. (Though only with him, as it turns out.) “I am content,” the other husband says to his wife, when she wonders if there isn’t more to life. Later that same man will say “I am forty-five years old. I don’t have time to merely be content. I need to be happy.”
Don’t we all.
The film features well-known Swedish actors. Lena Endre, among others. She also starred in Ingmar Bergman’s Trolösa (Faithless). Indeed this movie has shades of Bergman and Lars Norén, a well-known Swedish playright. Somehow the quiet desperation of bourgeois coupledom seems to endure as an endless fountain of storylines. And why shouldn’t it.
